Sunday, 3 February 2013

This is the place to which your people camefor want of a destination less well advertised
They should not have stayedas though the decision to leave were ever really in view
or this has not affected youPlace your hands on the hood of the vehicleYou have a right to remain silentYou can never wash away the stainThe universe is unfolding as itwas meant to do
and out there in the darkness somewherebeyond the shame beyond the painbeyond the permanent humiliationwhere that over the rainbow yonder remains always wild and bluethey're getting ready for kickoff
almost as though they were about to be set free

Mud Pie, Lake Powell, Arizona

Lake Powell, Arizona

Beach activity on Lake Powell

Lake Powell, Arizona

Lake Powell, Arizona

Lake Powell, Arizona

Lake Powell, created by the flooding of Glen Canyon above the controversialGlen Canyon Dam

Arizona -- near Page

Lake Powell, Arizona

Camping on banks of Lake Powell

Navajo boys watch a scuba diving class at Lake Powell

Navajo Generating Plant under construction, Page, Coconino County,
Arizona. Occupying over a thousand acres leased from the Navajo Indians,
the plant will be the largest electric generating station in Arizona

Folly is always folly -- yet this one is rare in that the mistake of damming
Glen Canyon became clear within the lifetimes of the people responsible. But
it's also rare in that, here, we may really get a second chance. If the Glen
Canyon Institute and others have their way, we'll bypass this dam, fill Lake
Mead, and designate Glen Canyon a national park.... When that happens, the
drained Lake Powell and the resurrected Glen Canyon will be emblematic not of
our folly but of the graciousness with which nature is still willing to meet
our adolescent species halfway. It will be a monument to the possibility that
we haven't totally screwed up the planet forever, that we might still be able
to back off a little and make our peace with the rest of Creation.

-- Bill McKibben, forward toResurrection: Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the
American West (2009)

5 comments:

yes,and Edward Abbey...for scenesof Albuquerque,New Mexico beforeit became an urban sprawl...seethe black and white movie, The Brave Cowboy with Kirk Douglas...it will draw you to theWest and there's still a great dealleft...By definition...a poet cansee the whole world in a grain ofsand.

And the light's not the only thing vicious in the bigger picture here,

which we have in view.

The Glen Canyon project is a salient (and notorious) example of the hubristic attempts of men to control and exploit nature for perceived gain. It has irrevocably altered river flow, landscape and ecology in the Canyon Country of the Colorado.

The nominal community of Page, seen in some of the photos, rose up as a company town for dam construction workers. The site of those trailer villages was once the stark butte-and-mesa country indelibly evoked by the Krazy Kat cartoons of George Herriman, who vacationed annually in Coconino Country long before there was ever a Page.

Many who care about such matters view the dam's effects as an environmental tragedy. Edward Abbey's 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang fictionalizes a fantasy of blowing it up. The 1983 Dream Garden Press edition of the novel was appropriately illustrated by R. Crumb, whose vision of the flow of the action decorated the banks with some of those plastic-boat-and-camera-toting "recreational tourist" types of whom the real-life originals can be seen in the top selections from Lyntha Scott Eiler's photos, here.

Without their tubular trailers and beach umbrellas, in this desert, tourists would be lost and end up as road kill or buzzard lunch, the riverine life forms killed off by the dam no longer present to console their restless ghosts.

As for the strip mining of the Four Corners region, that is again a historical environmental tragedy whose effects (especially airborne toxic pollution from the big power generating plants) have been perhaps little known to those far away, but for those in the high plateau neighborhood, as intimate as, and inextricable from, the air breathed.

In Lyntha Scott Eiler's photo-study we see the leasing of lands from the tribes going hand in hand with the violation of those historical lands, much of the transgression branded, for big energy corporate P.R. purposes, with the word Navajo. (As is documented in another series of photos in her arresting -- and chilling -- portfolio, traditional agricultural lands of the Hopi have also been affected.)

But hey, the cultural bonuses. Free scuba lessons for curious native American bystanders at the lake that was never a lake and whose banks were never sand, always just plain dirt and stone.